How to Dodge a Cannonball by Dennard Dayle

Published by Henry Holt and Co. on June 17, 2025

How to Dodge a Cannonball is a Civil War comedy that morphs into an alternate history. The protagonist, a 15-year-old named Anders, participates in “the second-craziest American rebellion” he’s seen. It comes in the midst of the craziest rebellion, the Civil War.

Anders comes from a long line of soldiers who specialized in flag twirling. When he’s seven, his mother tells him that, if their family “had gotten their due, we’d still be down south” with land and slaves and a future. She blames high-interest lenders for chasing them to Illinois. Anders’ mother instructs him to “pursue an education and avoid asking for hugs,” but when he’s fourteen, Anders joins the Union Army. He twirls flags for ten months before switching his allegiance to the Confederacy.

Confederate General Longstreet assures his soldiers that they are fighting for freedom because “every man, save a few simians, deserves freedom.” Shortly after Longstreet orders his men to charge across a field to engage a large assembly of Union soldiers, Anders drops his flag and sprints “in the exact opposite direction, away from the cannons and rifles and bayonets and fists and other tools for ending his life before he was good and ready to go.” When the Union soldiers begin to advance, Anders removes the blue uniform from a fallen body and again becomes a Union soldier.

Anders is in a pickle when he discovers that the regiment he’s joining consists of black soldiers. To explain his presence, Anders claims to be an octoroon, an explanation that satisfies white officers who believe that “one-eighth [N-word] rounds up to [N-word].” A black corporal named Gleason takes Anders under his wing, giving Anders an opportunity to prove his worth as a flag twirler.

The story that follows is peppered with humor. Some is drawn from the number of black soldiers named Jefferson (including the corpse that once wore Anders’ uniform) who contend that they descended from the nation’s third president. When Anders asks a white Jefferson whether he is related to the former president, the man asks, “Do I look black?”

Other laughs come from discussions of religion. When Anders tells Gleason “All I know is that God isn’t paying much attention,” Gleason replies, “Then you’re a Deist!” and proudly proclaims the “legacy of reason” that Deists have shared, “stretching back to the Founders.” General Harrow cautions his black soldiers not to bother him with “Baptist nonsense” and assures them that if prayer worked, none of them would have been slaves.

Without intending a pun, I would characterize the racial comedy as dark. Anders knows some Confederate codes but can’t get white officers to believe him without revealing that he’s white and a Confederate deserter. When Gleason tells Harrow that Anders is a codebreaker, Harrow responds: “We can’t stake battles on black intelligence. Even if it’s reliable, it perverts the character of the army.”

To Anders’ surprise, a soldier named Petey turns out to be a woman named Patricia. She wanted to be a soldier instead of a nurse because nurses “just saw important bits off people all day.” Using makeup, Patricia becomes a white woman named Polly.

Dennard Dayle also finds disturbing humor in the hypocrisy of war. Apart from the Confederacy's bizarre claim that fighting to preserve slavery is actually a battle for freedom, the Union's claim of moral superiority is undone when Harrow’s regiment is ordered to loot the local community because the Union Army “saved the men and women of this region from pillaging by Lee’s barbarians. Now we’ll help them contribute what they can for our trouble. The patriots among them will appreciate it.” Gleason devises his own looting plan, focusing on an arms factory owned by Slade Jefferson, a white manufacturer of weapons who sells his wares to both sides of the conflict.

While the undercurrent of comedy keeps the story flowing, Dayle’s novel addresses serious themes, including the occasionally confusing nature of racial and gender identity. Slade advances another of the novel’s themes: the futility of war. “When the last shot is fired,” he proclaims, “this will be the same country it was in 1861. Just less crowded.”

The story holds the reader's attention by moving in unlikely directions. Practicing “speculative dramaturgy,” Gleason writes a play about a version of Frankenstein’s monster that serves as a human computer called Clotho. Anders delivers a letter from Slade to his female business partner in Manhattan, a mission that proves to be deadly. The last several chapters take place in New Mexico, where a new monarchy is taking hold — the “second-craziest rebellion” in Anders’ young life.

I found the New Mexico portion of the story to be less biting (and less interesting) than the rest, but How to Dodge a Cannonball succeeds as a satire of American history. Clotho puts a fine point on that history when he explains that, despite all its computational talents, it “can’t make a culture sane. United Americana inherited a single, insane lie. Freedom built on bondage. A structure demanding servitude and celebrating its absence.” Hypocrisy is indeed one of the nation’s defining characteristics, which might be why many people believe that schools should either rewrite history or ignore it.

The novel asks big questions — What is freedom? What is art? What is race? — and delivers non-answers that both inform and amuse.

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